Angus Hyland

Partner
Pentagram

Angus Hyland is a graphic designer, author and creative director. He has been named one of the UK’s top ten graphic designers by The Independent, and has received over a hundred creative awards, including five D&AD silver awards. After running his own successful studio in Soho for ten years, he became a partner in Pentagram’s London offices in 1998.

What role does music play in your day-to-day life as a creative?

From about the age of ten, music has always been there; although my relationship with music is very different to what it was growing up. I’m from the vinyl generation, acquiring new records and ​obsessively playing them at every opportunity, everything was built around that process. Nowadays music slots neatly into my periods of downtime, it’s my decompression chamber at the end of a long day.

Tell us about your playlist:

I’m a compulsive playlist maker, I suppose it’s my way of appeasing the record collector in me. Coming up with a good concept for a playlist is key, although concepts can also be crippling; thirty iterations later and still agonising over the overall tone and composition.

I decided to approach my playlist for Various Artists a little differently, ​​almost spontaneously. Instead of fixating on the theme, it was a playlist of consequences; one song followed the other, the exquisite corpse. Although, in an attempt to impose a deadline of sorts, I decided to hang the entire playlist off the song ‘September’ and it’s now October… So read into that what you like!